Husband, Father of Twins, Published Author, Entrepreneur, Passionate Technologist, Programmer and Productivity Nut. more at https://about.me/eibrahim

Oct 16, 2017

How I Run My Newsletter on Frontend Development

What?

I run a weekly newsletter called Frontend Weekly that is a curated list of articles related to frontend development. As of October 2017, it has been running for almost a year and half now and it has a reach of over 10k. I created the newsletter for fun and I have not made any money from it so far, I am just focusing on growing it for now. I publish stats once every 3 months, here is my last post on stats.

Why?

I read tons of articles on programming in general and frontend development specifically. It’s hard to keep up with all the innovation/churn/noise/frameworks of frontend programming, which is why I created a weekly newsletter. I know there are a bunch of other great newsletters out there but my biggest problem is that they have way TOO MANY links and articles, it’s overwhelming. That’s why I only include 7 or 8 links in each newsletter edition — I think that’s a manageable amount of weekly reading.

My other motive for creating a newsletter is marketing. My favorite marketer — Seth Godin — always talks about having a “tribe” or an “audience” or a “platform”. I wanted this newsletter to be my platform. I am always working on one side project or another and if you are an entrepreneur or a startup founder, you know how difficult it is to find customers without an audience or platform. Most of my products are somehow related to developers, so having a “tribe” of frontend developers could help launch some of these products (see examples below).

How?

Enough rambling, here is how I manage and automate the newsletter. I use curated.co to curate the links, it’s an extra cost but it saves me time. I just didn’t want to write each email by hand every week.

Collect:

I collect links in a google spreadsheet — now my assistant does it for me. I gave him certain parameters and instructions on the sort of articles we need and are looking for. He usually curates 10 to 20 links which gives me enough content to review/reject/accept.

More?

I also have a medium publication that has now over 5000 followers and is growing rapidly. The links in this publication are different than the newsletter but occasionally you will see an article in both.

It’s really hard to keep up with all the front-end development news out there. Let us help you. We hand-pick interesting articles related to front-end development. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter at http://frontendweekly.co

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